The mention of the direct interposition of God brings us naturally to the supernatural bias of the time. Here judgment is not so easy. It is possible to represent the replacement of the old positivism of the educated ancients (by supernaturalism and the transcendental formulas of the creeds) as part of the general decline. It is equally possible to represent it as the one leaven in an unsatisfactory lump. Certainly the divorce between the thought of the (largely positivist) educated class of our own day and that of the populace, now (as ever) full either of religious or political superstition and careless both of philosophic theory and scientific fact, this divorce, I say, is certainly evil. But in the Dark Ages popular superstition ran riot without qualification or corrective. It is a commonplace that the officials of the Church retained a measure of organization and discipline when civil government was going to pieces, that the Church was the central institution of the time, and that most of its outstanding personalities were churchmen. What is not always seized is the extreme importance of the monastic institution. The monk scholars, whom the Church alone sheltered, could at least hand on the knowledge of the great books of the past, although when they wrote they could make only huge, dull commentaries on those same books. How then did such a time get any business done at all? Economically, by raising the slave to a serf; politically, by an increase of local power. With the decay of communications and police, the slave could simply run away and could not be brought back. Clearly, to get any work out of him at all, it must be made to his interest to stay. This was done by requiring of him only a fixed and comparatively small amount of his produce as dues for the land he tilled, and permitting him to enjoy the surplus which he could increase up to the limit of his power. This arrangement “worked” after a fashion. In giving to the labourer more dignity and independence, it had an intimate (although apparently quite unconscious) connection with the Church’s doctrine of an equal worth of all souls in the sight of God. Politically, the financial exhaustion of the central governments, and the slackening of communications, as the great Roman roads were not kept up, helped to throw more and more power and initiative upon local governors; until at last, instead of appointed officers they became almost local kings who could, and did, hand their offices to their sons as they could their property. This last capital change did not occur until midway in the ninth century, the second of three centuries of attacks from without which broke upon the degraded Roman society and almost destroyed it.